Piccard Balloon Flights: "From Gondola to Manned Spacecraft" ~ 1966 NASA

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piccard

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Jean Felix Piccard (January 28, 1884 in Basel, Switzerland – January 28, 1963 in Minneapolis, Minnesota), also known as Jean Piccard, was a Swiss-born American chemist, engineer, professor and high-altitude balloonist. He invented clustered high-altitude balloons, and with his wife Jeannette, the plastic balloon. Piccard's inventions and co-inventions are used in balloon flight, aircraft and spacecraft...

Piccard was the co-pilot for his wife Jeannette on the third and final voyage of the Century of Progress. The largest balloon in the world was conceived for him to fly at the World's Fair in 1933 but was flown there by US Navy pilots who were licensed. After this flight he created the liquid oxygen converter when the liquid failed to vaporize on descent after the cabin doors were open. Piccard developed a frost-free window, that was used on this flight and later by the Navy and Air Force in the B-24 Liberator or B-26 Marauder. He used blasting caps and TNT for releasing the balloon at launch and for remote release of external ballast from inside the sealed cabin. This was the first use of pyrotechnics for remote-controlled actuating devices in aircraft, an unpopular, revolutionary idea at the time. Later his student Robert R. Gilruth, who became the director of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, approved and used them in spacecraft...

Developed with John Akerman of the University of Minnesota and piloted by Jean Piccard in 1937 in Rochester, Minnesota, the first multi-celled balloon was called The Pleiades and was made of 98 latex rubber balloons. In a letter to Robert Gray of the Dewey and Almy Chemical Co. later published in Time magazine, Piccard describes how he broke balloons with a hunting knife and revolver to control his descent. A TNT charge released the cluster as he expected but sent burning excelsior down that destroyed the first Pleiades. He suggested to Gray that rock wool in place of excelsior would prevent similar accidents in the future.

Balloon research stopped for the most part during World War II.

In February 1946 with Otto C. Winzen, Jean Piccard proposed manned flight to the US Navy using clustered balloons made of thin plastic. In June the Office of Naval Research approved Project Helios and that year General Mills and the University of Minnesota contracted to build a cluster of 100 polyethylene balloons for atmospheric research. Helios was designed to reach 100,000 feet for ten hours with a payload of instruments.

Jean Piccard helped Winzen design the Skyhook polyethylene balloons that replaced Project Helios in 1947. Skyhook balloons were used unmanned for atmospheric research by the Navy and for manned flights by the US Air Force. Later Jean Piccard developed electronics for emptying ballast bags...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Piccard

Auguste Antoine Piccard (28 January 1884 – 24 March 1962) was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer, known for his record-breaking helium-filled balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth's upper atmosphere. Auguste was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean's depths.

Piccard's twin brother Jean Felix Piccard is also a notable figure in the annals of science and exploration, as are a number of their relatives, including Jacques Piccard, Bertrand Piccard, Jeannette Piccard and Don Piccard...

On 27 May 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer took off from Augsburg, Germany, and reached a record altitude of 15,781 m (51,775 ft) (9.8 miles). (FAI Record File Number 10634) During this flight, they became the first human beings to enter the stratosphere, and were able to gather substantial data on the upper atmosphere, as well as measure cosmic rays. Piccard and Kipfer are widely considered the first people to visually observe the curvature of the earth.

On 18 August 1932, launched from Dübendorf, Switzerland, Piccard and Max Cosyns made a second record-breaking ascent to 16,201 m (53,153 ft). (FAI Record File Number 6590) He ultimately made a total of twenty-seven balloon flights, setting a final record of 23,000 m (75,459 ft).

In the mid-1930s, Piccard's interests shifted when he realized that a modification of his high-altitude balloon cockpit would allow descent into the deep ocean...